“Salve!” she exclaimed, passionately, unable to control herself any longer—­“what rubbish are you talking?  Do you not know perfectly well that if you had been an admiral itself you never would have been greater in my eyes than you are now, and always have been as a simple pilot?  And pray, whom was I thinking of when I was looking at Van Spyck? why, of whom but of you?—­thinking that the man called Salve Kristiansen, who stood behind me, was just the one to have done what Van Spyck did.  Or when I was admiring the North Star was I not thinking then too:  If you, Salve, were in command of her, they would see what she could really do with a proper man on board?  What possible interest do you suppose I could have in the North Star, except in connection with you?  Were not you, poor skipper of the Apollo, worth more, a thousand times more to me, than a hundred North Stars with all their bravery?”

When she spoke like this it was impossible not to believe every single word of what she said, and Salve’s expression while she had been speaking had gradually changed to one of inexpressible happiness.  So it was really he, and he alone, who had been the hero of her life! and he stretched out his arms to her, as though, like Alcibiades of old, he would end the discussion by clasping her to his heart and carrying her straight off with him to his home.  But he was arrested by the deep repelling seriousness with which she continued—­

“No, Salve!—­it is not which that stands between us, however ingeniously you may have discovered it—­it is not that,—­it is something else.  It is that you don’t trust me in your heart; that is the truth—­and that has been the real source of all these morbid ideas you have formed.

“And look you,” she went on, with wild anguish in her voice, “we shall never get on together as long as you encourage the faintest suspicion of such thoughts; we shall never have peace beside our hearth—­that peace that I have been striving for all these years, when I have been submitting, as I did, to everything—­in a way that you know well, Salve, was very far from natural to me,” and as she said this she looked with a magnificent air at him; “and if you cannot yet understand that—­may God help you—­and us!” she ended in despair, and turning half away again to the fire, stared dejectedly into it.

He stood before her half-averted form as if he had been paralysed, and scarcely dared to look up at her, with such truth had all that she had said come home to him.  She had held a mirror up to their life together, and he saw himself in it so utterly selfish and so small by the side of all this love.  He was profoundly pained and humbled, and was too naturally truthful to wish not to acknowledge it.

He went absently to the window and stood there for a moment.